


Koshchei the Deathless

by hansbekhart



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes in a cage, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: Civil War Speculation, Gen, Natasha Romanov in a glass cage of emotion, Never pity a man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 14:14:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5788309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s still wearing the clothes they caught him in.  A long sleeved red shirt, a pair of dark jeans.  They’ve taken his jacket, and his shoes and socks.  His bare feet are pale, with little smatterings of dark hair across the top of them.  His toes are long, and incongruously human looking.  Even after years of knowing Steve, she’s still never been sure he is - human, that is - and standing in front of the thick glass her memories get tangled up with the last time she did something like this.  But that monster had stood fully clothed, and she’s seen this one chained more often than not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Koshchei the Deathless

**Author's Note:**

> For the [mcuflashmeme](http://mcuflashmeme.dreamwidth.org/1389.html) challenge: A retelling of a fairytale. 
> 
> I realized I've never written Natasha? So obviously I had to pick [a Russian one,](http://russian-crafts.com/tales/maria_morevna.html) and what better monster than an immortal giant who menaces women?
> 
> Huge thanks to [Cryogenia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cryogenia) for the workshopping and beta read.

  
  
Natasha goes the first night, before security tightens up and becomes routine, while she still knows where they’re holding him. It’s easy enough for someone like her, and if they weren’t holding him in the same sort of cage they’d use to hold Bruce Banner and Steve Rogers, it would be just as easy for him.

Maybe it is that easy, still. Maybe he’s just biding his time; she puts nothing past him. 

He’s still wearing the clothes they caught him in. A long sleeved red shirt, a pair of dark jeans. They’ve taken his jacket, and his shoes and socks. His bare feet are pale, with little smatterings of dark hair across the top of them. His toes are long, and incongruously human looking. Even after years of knowing Steve, she’s still never been sure he is - human, that is - and standing in front of the thick glass her memories get tangled up with the last time she did something like this. But that monster had stood fully clothed, and she’s seen this one chained more often than not. 

He raises his head when Natasha steps close to his cage. The look on his face is disinterested, and then it sharpens. He doesn’t say anything. They watch each other silently. She wants to press her fingertips against the glass. 

“Do you know me?” she asks. 

He tilts his head a little and smiles; she’d said it in Russian. He’s sitting with his back up against the glass and his arms wrapped loosely around his knees, which makes him look rather young. “Sure,” he answers in English, and the smile slips off his face like he’s forgotten about it. He looks down, rests his cheek on his shoulder. It’s the left one, the one that HYDRA gave him. “Do you have any water?” he asks, still looking away. “They haven’t left any.” 

They haven’t left anything. No privacy, no toilet, no shoes. He doesn’t seem bothered by it. He seems bored. 

Natasha crouches down to get on his level, and they look at each other for a few moments. His eyes flick up and down her, measuring. On her side of the glass, the facility is dead quiet: two guards stationed outside the blast doors, two more at the apogee of their rounds, an hour still until shift change. Quiet enough to hear the plates in his arm shifting, the electric hum of whatever powers it. 

“You were in DC,” he says. 

“We’ve met a few times,” she answers. 

He uncoils. She tenses instinctively, but he only rolls up onto his knees, to face her fully. His mismatched hands lay loose and curled. His shoulders are just as broad as Rogers’. They didn’t used to be, in the newsreels she’d watched after Nick assigned her to watch over Rogers (to make sure Captain America didn’t kill himself, mostly). In the newsreels Bucky Barnes had been ordinary. Handsome, of course. The kind of handsome that caught the eye. The kind of smile that made you wonder if he’d been fun in bed. But ordinary, still. She hadn’t recognized him. 

Natasha doesn’t feel embarrassed about it now, looking at him. He’s still handsome, but he doesn’t look much like he used to. It was a miracle Rogers had known him at all. 

Her hands twitch, where she’s got them braced on her knees. Her thighs are aching from the route she’d had to take, to get into his prison. The ache is comforting. Grounding. Her heart’s beating quickly. Rogers can hear when people’s hearts pound, can hear their blood sloshing around in their veins. She’s not sure what Barnes can hear. The look on his face is blank and watchful, like the wild dogs she used to see sometimes as a child, skulking around in the frozen forests. Like the faces of the girls she’d grown up with, hungry and not to be trusted. It makes her heart ache, too: a feeling that’s anything but grounding. 

“Do you remember the little girls?” she asks him. 

That makes it through, at last. Emotion flickers over Barnes’ face. He’s looking at her now, really looking instead of sizing her up. He licks his lips. “Were you one of them?” 

She nods, carefully - keeps her breathing slow, her gaze steady. It’s more effort than she likes to slow her heart, keep it quiet enough that she can ignore it. His eyes are very pale in the stark light overhead. His face looks bloodless. “How,” he says, and his voice cracks. “How long ago was that?” 

“Twenty one years,” she tells him. 

He sits back on his heels, scrubs a hand over his face. It’s the right hand, the one he was born with. He has long fingers and short, blunt nails. The knuckles are scraped: scabbed and healing over. He’d fought when he was taken, of course. Maybe he doesn’t heal as fast as Rogers. She doesn’t think anyone’s ever been able to compare the two of them, their strengths and abilities and weaknesses. Or at least there weren’t any records of it in SHIELD’s files, if they had. 

She’s never been back to Russia, to the places where she’d been unmade. She’d thought about it often. She knows the facilities were dismantled, had been even before she’d defected. But she’s never gone back, the idea of it like touching a bruise. 

She never really understood why - most of her wants to know for sure that it was all truly, really gone, that they’d burnt down the compounds and salted the earth - until she shadowed Steve Rogers around New York City during the last days he’d lived there. She had seen him stoop, grieved, over too tall trees and crumbling buildings. She’s never had another home to go back to, and she understood then that she’s never been quite ready to see in concrete terms how it’s moved on without her. 

He puts his hand down, straightens his shoulders. “So who do you work for now?” he asks. 

“Does it matter?” she asks. She shifts herself, finding a more comfortable position. She wants, absurdly, to sit cross legged at his feet. They used to sit that way, in a wide circle around the thin practice mat, watching him beat little girls into weapons. Waiting for their turn. Any minute he’ll stand and it’ll be her turn to step into the cage and face him. Once, he’d fractured her wrist. They’d liked that, actually: she hadn’t cried out. She’d kept fighting. 

“Not really,” he says, and smiles. It’s a newsreel sort of smile, the kind that makes you wonder if he’d still be fun in bed. 

“I’m not here to take you,” Natasha tells him. 

“Then why are you here?” he asks. His voice still sounds the same, at least. Softer than you’d think, to look at him - not deep and commanding, the way Rogers’ is. It had been everything else about him that had made the girls snap to his attention. 

“What do you think they’ll do with you?” she asks, rather than answer. She’s not even sure what reason she’d give for coming here to see him. The truth, maybe, if she knew it herself. 

He shrugs. That doesn’t matter much either. 

“There’s talk of executing you,” she says, to see the look on his face. The little smile doesn’t waver; he actually winks at her. They both know the answer to that, anyway. Weapons are made to be used, not thrown away. She tries a third time. 

“Steve doesn’t know you’re here,” she says, “but he will.” 

His hand slams _BANG!_ against the glass, and she jumps back, points her gun at his face even though it doesn’t do either of them any good. 

“You can’t let him,” he says, and the terror on his face mirrors the terror coursing through her body. She looks behind herself, checks the door - still quiet. No sound from the guards on the other side. “You can’t let him know,” Barnes says again, pleading. 

She drops the gun back into its holster. She stands, smoothing out skirts she isn’t wearing, rotating each ankle as she steps delicately back towards the cage. He stays on his knees, that silver hand pressed against the glass, looking up at her. His other hand is on the glass too, two fingers and a thumb leaving little smears of oil down his side of the cage. 

“Don’t you want to see him?” she asks, soft. He shudders and turns away. 

“You couldn’t know how much,” he says, and she thinks maybe that’s true. She’d walked away after giving Rogers that first thread, the one he’d pulled and pulled, yanking himself hand over fist down the decades, through the patchwork history of the Winter Soldier, looking for his friend. She hadn’t stuck around long enough to see Rogers’ grief made new. 

“You’d rather let them take you, though,” she says, and he drops his eyes, guilty. Through his eyelashes she watches his gaze flick around the cage, unerringly finding each camera and microphone, an answer in itself. He hasn’t said anything incriminating (no, that’s all been her), and he’s not going to - but he’s not going to let anyone use him again. 

“Ste -” he says, and stops, stricken. “He doesn’t -” 

Natasha crouches again, and he looks up at her. “He doesn’t care,” she says, as soft as she can. Barnes shakes his head violently. He doesn’t have the words for whatever he’s trying to say. He’s pulling on the plates along his left arm, sticking the tips of his fingers underneath them like they itch, or hurt him. There’s sweat along his hairline, and his face is red and blotchy. She watches, fascinated. 

He’s human after all. Who knew. 

“I understand,” she says to him, in Russian. “You’ve got a lot of red in your leger.” 

She sees him take that in, the minute shifts in his expression. 

“Too much,” he says. 

“You could wipe it out,” she says. She doesn’t even know what she’s offering - amnesty, jail break, indentured servitude to the Avengers, to tell Rogers everything and let him send the whole situation veering off into chaos - but Barnes shakes his head again, looks up and meets her eyes. 

“No I can’t,” Barnes says, and closes his metal hand into a fist. It sparks, but he doesn’t look at it, doesn’t look away from her. “No one could.” 

Natasha’s breath catches. She lets it out, ragged. She can feel her face turn hot, and her heart turns hot too. Her whole body thrums with denial and doubt. But it’s an old feeling, and she’s used to it: the one that surprises her now is pity. 

He sighs. His head hangs heavy on his neck, like an old man. When he speaks again, his voice is muffled against his chest. “Do you have any water?” he asks in English. 

Her voice feels stuck in her throat, but she nods and gets to her feet. A search through the cupboards yields bottled water and some sad looking meal bars, wrapped in crinkly foil. She takes a couple of those for him too; if they’d left him without water, who knew when he’d next get to eat. 

There’s a passage cut into the wall of the cage, with thick clear doors on either side of it, and a little shelf in between. She remembers the setup from her own days of captivity: the sleep deprivation, the endless debrief sessions, the light that never turned off. They put the food and water through one door, you take it out the other. Only one door can be opened at a time; your door is sealed shut until theirs is as well. Nice and isolated, and safe in theory for all involved. She’d never worked past it, at least - and had only tried once. She’d wanted them to want her, after all. Black Widows were valuable, of course - but they’d made dozens of them, and Natasha hadn’t truly believed she was gonna walk out of there until she’d seen Barton standing in the open doorway. 

When she turns back around, Barnes is on his feet, pressed up against the glass in front of the little door. She jumps; she hadn’t heard him move. He’s just as tall as Rogers is, and he stares at her, blank and watchful. 

It sends a little shiver up her spine, but he’s on one side of the glass, and she’s on the other. Safe, in theory. 

“Not worried I’ll poison you?” she asks, as she opens up her little door and reaches one hand inside, placing her offerings on the smooth surface. She pitches her tone teasing, and carefully holds that empty gaze - but there’s still no warning. 

He yanks his little door right off its hinges and grabs her arm where it’s still inside the passageway, popping her shoulder neatly out of its socket. She doesn’t scream. The hard impact against the glass and her astonishment at how quickly she’s lost control of the situation cost her the only seconds she’ll have against him. She knows what he’s going to do even as cold metal fingers worm their way into the sleeve of her jacket, plucking her stingers unerringly from their hiding places. 

“ _No_ -” she manages, and then he triggers one, pressed palm to palm between them. 

The world goes hot and black. 

Her limbs drop like her strings have been cut. His hand on her arm is the only thing that keeps her upright. He lets her go slowly, so she doesn’t crash to the ground. He looks at the other stingers he took from her, pokes a finger into the little pile in his hand. Picks up the bottle of water and takes a drink. 

The floor is cold under her back. There’s an acrid smell in the air: the damage done to his arm, though it still seems functional. Her whole body’s jerking helplessly, the bite of the stinger firing all of her nerves at once. Her heart is hammering wildly against her chest, so hard it actually hurts, like how she imagines a heart attack would feel. He can hear it, she thinks, and feels fury so thick it feels like hate. 

Helpless, Natasha watches him walk to the door of his cage, tucking the water bottle into the back pocket of his jeans. He’d scabbed up his knuckles digging a lip onto the doorframe, and now he places four stingers up on top of it and dribbles a thin line of water between each one. He uses his metal hand again to trigger one, and there’s a _pop pop pop_ as the others go off in turn. 

The lights inside the cage dim. 

He digs his fingers back under the plates of his arm, and this time they lift up - letting him pull something thin and long from underneath them. Plastique, she thinks, and manages to roll to cover her face just in time for him to blow the door. 

He takes her gun while she’s still on the floor, stunned by the explosion and the shrieking pain of her shoulder. He shoots the two guards that come through the door. They make heavy noises when they hit the ground, and for a moment everything is completely, absolutely quiet. 

He stands still for a long moment, like he’s contemplating the bodies of the guards, and then he turns towards her. His bare feet are noiseless on the cold floor, each slow step a thunderclap up her spine. She has a knife tucked into her boot, and for a wild moment she wonders if she could make any difference with it. He picks her up under her armpits as easily as he’d done when she was a child, and props her up against the glass. 

He crouches in front of her, eyes bright. His toes crackle and pop, and she flinches. The gun dangles in his right hand. “It’s safer,” he says, quietly, “if Steve doesn’t find me. Can you make sure he doesn’t?” 

She wants to tell him that she’ll help him. She wants to get away from him so badly she almost crawls on the floor to do it. What comes out instead is a rusty, shaky laugh. “No,” she says. “He’ll start a war to find you.”  
  



End file.
